Can Ed Psych Inform Education for the Greater Good?

Post by Francesca López, PhD (Pennsylvania State University)

As APA and Division 15 address systemic racism, orchestrated political attacks threaten educators’ efforts to address racial injustice. What should the role of educational psychologists be?

Intensifying racial tensions after the murders of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020, Breonna Taylor in March 2020, and George Floyd in May 2020 led to a watershed moment known as the “Summer of Racial Reckoning.” The reckoning mobilized school leaders across the nation to increase efforts to provide educators with the knowledge and skills to foster equitable school environments. In response, Executive Orders were passed by President Trump and then rescinded by President Biden, which in turn prompted legislators in 41 states to propose nearly 200 “gag order” bills that “target discussions of race, racism, gender, and American history” (Pen America, 2022). The bills have expanded to include punitive measures, including termination or criminal charges for teachers (Pen America, 2022). Division 15’s Statement on Racism asks whether educational psychology “can be harnessed to make changes for the greater good.” The current crisis faced by educators in K-12 schools lay bare the urgency of this question.

Educational psychology has been an accomplice to the marginalization of many communities by engaging in practices recently admonished by the APA, some of which are still prominent in the field. Although still pervasively underrepresented in published research, educational psychologists who publish research focused on ways to address marginalization tend to do so in a very limited number of special issues. Although a vision toward the greater good requires actions that remedy systemic marginalization, the current educational controversies also require an understanding that education is never “a-political.” Indeed, the gag orders that threaten what can be taught, as well as what books are banned, are largely a partisan endeavor that has a long history. For example:

• Harold Rugg was an educational psychologist who created a series of textbooks in the 1920s and 1930s aimed at developing students’ critical thinking and contributing to a just, equitable society. He became the target of the American Legion in the late 1930s and was accused of casting doubt on the greatness of the United States, promoting socialism and indoctrination. Congressional testimony urged dropping the term “social studies” from schools, teaching geography as a separate course focused solely on maps, and excluding contemporary issues from history.
• Not long after Nixon was re-elected by unprecedented margins after running on a campaign that fabricated a sex education crisis (Berkshire & Schneider, 2021), Jerome Bruner’s Man: A Course of Study, an inquiry-driven social studies curriculum aimed at developing reasoning skills that would lead to a better world, was made the subject of controversy.

Many other partisan-led controversies have targeted equitable approaches in education. These include bilingual education and multicultural education in the 1990s, ethnic studies in the 2010s, and today’s gag orders. What all these controversies share in common is that they are efforts orchestrated by politicians for political gains.

Educational psychology is indebted to scholars who have engaged deeply with the political world of schools. These educational psychologists have revealed intentional misinformation about the supposed ineffectiveness of American schools, promulgated to undermine public education for political and economic gains (e.g., Berliner, 1993b, 2019a, 2019b; Glass, 2008). This includes exposing dishonest rhetoric about the ineffectiveness of teachers (e.g., Berliner & Biddle, 1995) and a myopic focus on accountability and choice that has been most damaging to communities of color (e.g., Berliner & Glass, 2014; Glass, 2008; Nichols et al., 2006). This scholarship also provides an explanation of the forces that sacrifice the collective good of society at large to promote the individual interests of very few (Berliner & Biddle, 1995; Berliner & Glass, 2014; Glass, 2008). Their insights are relevant to the attacks against educators today and challenge the pretense that classrooms could ever be a-political, neutral context.

In addition to contributions that reveal how policies aim to undermine education, a growing number of educational psychologists are making important contributions to address systemic racism in the field. For example, researchers have demonstrated that teachers who claim to “not see color” tend to have negative emotions and thoughts about students of color (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2020); school is perceived to be more unfair by Latinx and Black students than their White peers (Seo et al., 2019); and students of color experience lower levels of belonging (Gray et al., 2018). Related research has also shown that implicit biases undermine teachers’ expectations of student ability (e.g., Denessen et al., 2020; Stark et al., 2020) and hinder practices that affirm students of color (DeCuir-Gunby et al., 2020; Kumar et al., 2021). Taken together, this evidence contributes to the understanding of how inequities have been promoted and sustained for students of color.

To harness educational psychology for the greater good, the field must abandon the pretense that research and education are neutral. Both have the power to create systems that oppress and marginalize—and have done so for decades. But they also have the power to liberate and contribute to the greater good.